Optimizing your AWS environment using Trusted Advisor (Part 2)

AWS provides an oft overlooked tool available to accounts with “Business” or “Enterprise” level support called Trusted Advisor (TA). Trusted Advisor is a tool that analyzes your current AWS resources for ways to improve your environment in the following categories:

Cost Optimization

Security

Performance

Fault Tolerance

It rigorously scours your AWS resources for inefficiencies, waste, potential capacity issues, best practices, security holes and much, much more. It provides a very straightforward and easy to use interface for viewing the identified issues.

Trusted Advisor will do everything from detecting EC2 instances that are under-utilized (e.g. using an m3.xlarge for a low traffic NAT instance), to detecting S3 buckets that are good candidates for fronting with a CloudFront distribution, to identifying Security Groups with wide open access to a port(s), and everything in between.

Two new features of the TA console I found particularly noteworthy and useful are the Action Links and Access Management.

Action Links allow you to click a hyperlink next to an issue in the TA Console that redirects you to the appropriate place to take action on the issue. Pretty slick… saves you time jumping around tabs in your browser or navigate to the correct Console and menus. Action Links will also take the guess work out of hunting down the correct place if you aren’t that familiar with the AWS Console.

Access Management allows you to use AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management) credentials to control access to specific categories and checks within Trusted Advisor. This gives you the ability to have granular access control over which people in your organization can view and act on specific checks.

In addition to the console, Trusted Advisor also supports API access. And this wouldn’t be my AWS blog post without some kind of coding example using Python and the boto library. The following example code will print out a nicely formatted list of all the Trusted Advisory categories and each of the checks underneath them in alphabetical order.

In addition to the meta-data about categories and checks, actual TA check results and recommendations can also be pulled and refreshed using the API.

While Trusted Advisor is a great tool to quickly scan your AWS environment for inefficiencies, waste, potential cost savings, basic security issues, and best practices, it isn’t a “silver bullet” solution. It takes a specific set of AWS architectural understanding, skills, and experience to look at an entire application stack or ecosystem and ensure it is properly designed, built, and/or tuned to best utilize AWS and its array of complex and powerful building blocks. This where a company like 2nd Watch can add immense value in a providing a true “top down” cloud optimization. Our architects and engineers are the best in the business at ensuring applications and infrastructure are designed and implemented using AWS and cloud computing best practices with a fierce attention to detail and focus on our customers’ success in their business and cloud initiatives.